The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  The thought was followed by a pulse of guilt. What had she really lost? A few scraps of clothing and a camera. Garland’s whole life had been aboard the ship.

  Cly had been buying presents again. A biggish satchel, embroidered with a night sky and a moon in a style that reminded her of a Vincent van Gogh painting, was lying on the bed. She tucked the bone box, her book of questions, and the rest of the mail inside. Then she glanced at the bird, Uhura. “Verena? You there? Pick up.”

  No answer.

  Heading back downstairs, she strode across the hotel courtyard, passing more moon pyres in various stages of construction. As agreed, Cly was stationed on a bench near the Black Fox, watching the entrance.

  “Parrish has gone around to the rear,” he murmured.

  “Thanks.”

  She headed inside, sought out the head concierge, and got him to prove, with a tippable flourish and just a hint of stuffy offense, that Kev was properly under lock and key in the room Cly had rented her. He was working his way through a bowl of citrusy-smelling porridge as they came in, eating with every appearance of zest.

  Her arrival put an end to that; he nearly choked.

  Thought I’d be dead, huh? What she said was, “You must be bored. Let’s go for a walk.”

  He heaved himself to his feet before the concierge could yank him up, mumbling some phrase which probably meant “As you wish, my lady and mistress,” but which was blessedly not in Fleet, and therefore incomprehensible to her.

  The Sylvanner concept of a hotel matched almost perfectly the same idea at home, lacking only the electronic conveniences. The Black Fox was no exception. It kept a front desk where guests checked in, writing their names in a big ledger. It had a small tearoom, where visitors to the city were, even now, frowning over ostrich eggs and morning correspondence. A lounge area, near the great staircase, offered guests comfy chairs from which to partake of the ambience.

  As Sophie paused in the lounge, Kev shifted nervously.

  He probably couldn’t speak without permission.

  “What’s up?” Sophie said.

  “Why are we here?”

  “I thought you could use a break from the tedium. You’ve been off kitchen duty since I had you inscribed, right?”

  “Oh—” He foundered. “I might go back to it today.”

  “I didn’t know you were into the pain. I’m sorry.”

  “You had to do it,” he said, scanning the lobby. “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “We’re going to laze around by the fire and catch up.”

  “You said a walk,” Kev offered, a little feebly.

  “Disappointing when people lie, isn’t it? So! I’ll take this chair, and you can park on the floor, by the hearth. Want a cushion? Here’s a fan. If anyone looks at you funny, you can wave it to ventilate me.”

  “Well—”

  “Now. Entertainment. You’re not allowed to read, unfortunately, or I’d give you a book. And they don’t do newspapers here, so I can’t drape one over the chair for you to scan.”

  “I don’t know ‘newspapers’…”

  “Unless you have a better suggestion, I think you’ll have to settle for people-watching.”

  “What will you be doing?”

  “Oh,” she said, “the same.”

  He swallowed convulsively, Adam’s apple bobbing in his doughy neck. “I’m accustomed to the kitchen.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Sophie told him.

  It was gratifying, in a sense, to see him fighting to smother his anxiety. It meant that this would work. She felt a twinge about making him squirm, and then made herself remember the shredded horse and the marsupial lion. If Cly hadn’t diverted to the slums outside of town, the fright would have gone berserk amid a parade in the heart of Hoarfrost.

  Was Cly’s decision to take them out to the sticks then, just then, another fortunate consequence of Sophie’s magical luck?

  A uniformed staffer came by, offering tea and biscuits. Sophie slipped a cookie to Kev when nobody was looking. He played with it, seeming to mean not to eat it, but eventually giving in and nibbling.

  Stress eater, she thought, giving him another.

  Her hip and shoulder, where she’d landed after the jump from the carriage, were stiffening as she sat.

  One of the junior concierge types drifted past, once and then twice. The second time, he met Kev’s eye, then walked away rapidly. Were they in cahoots? Had he been bribed?

  Kev slumped, miserable.

  The next time the junior concierge came by, Kev piped up, “I could use a relief break.”

  “The chief concierge can take you to pee.”

  “Perhaps you might like a break.…”

  “Rule number one of the stakeout is don’t leave your post,” she said.

  He mouthed the word “stakeout.”

  The clock struck the hour and he flinched.

  Ten minutes later, Mensalohm’s law clerk, Sophie’s former fake fiancé, came through the door.

  Daimon was dressed as a foreigner, with a sash denoting him a citizen of a slaveholder state—qualifying him to stay in the hotel. The garments were nondescript; he was as inconspicuous as any outsider could be. He exchanged a few flirtatious words with the woman at the front desk, tossed his pre-Raphaelite locks, and let his eyes roam the lounge with a casual air that hinted he wasn’t expecting to see anyone he recognized.

  When his gaze connected with Sophie’s, and then he saw Kev seated on the floor beside her, there was a moment of puzzlement, just a breath. Then he dropped his pen.

  Kev shouted, “Smitt! Fenza mey! Net ba treaten—”

  Daimon burst into motion, running so suddenly his hat was left behind—very Bugs Bunny. He bolted for the main doors of the hotel, dodged around a veiled woman dressed all in white with a crimson sash—

  And promptly ran into Cly, who tripped him with one elegant toe and then caught him by the scruff before he could fall on his face.

  “Gotcha,” Sophie murmured.

  CHAPTER 33

  Daimon. Daimon was the frightmaker. Daimon had sunk Nightjar and made that horrible cat-monster.

  Daimon hadn’t been eaten by a lizard oddity at all. He had almost certainly tried to get Kev away from Selwig.

  Daimon murdered Selwig.

  Sophie was sucking wind over that as Cly offered them a bow and hauled his prize back out into daylight. He had that pleased crocodile gleam about him. And why not? This was real progress.

  Torture. They’ll probably torture him.

  She turned to Kev, who was starting to hyperventilate. “You told me he was dead.”

  He huffed, bending almost double, and she relented. “Cell or kitchen?”

  “Kir? I mean—”

  “Don’t you dare milady me right now.”

  He gulped.

  “Oh, I’ll be back with a stack of questions, don’t you worry,” she said. “But right now, the cat’s away, hauling your frightmaker off to jail. It is him, isn’t it? Daimon’s really Smitt the frightmaker? He made that thing that attacked us last night?”

  Kev’s jaw worked, but no sound came out.

  “You weren’t afraid of him before,” she said. “He told you he could take you off Nightjar, any time—well, that his eragliding friend, Pree, could. What changed the deal?”

  “You shut off the clock in your cabin.”

  “He could have restarted that in a pinch.”

  “You were going to compel me to talk.”

  “Liar. We agreed I’d pacify you, no more than that.”

  He spread his hands, bowing his head.

  “Was it all bull, Kev? And if so, what was it for?”

  “When this began, I hoped, truly, just to save my own skin.” He stared at the doors, where Daimon and Cly had vanished. “But my part in this is fixed now. I’ll say no more.”

  “Fine. I have games of my own to plan. Would you rather be locked up, or do you want to wash dishes?”
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  “Dishes, please.”

  She dragged him off to the chief of staff, who got an earful about the underling she suspected of being in cahoots with Kev and Daimon. Once everyone understood that Kev needed extra-close guarding and that Cly would be the one checking up, she rushed to the hotel’s back door. In a little garden, for guests, Garland was holding up the third post of their stakeout.

  “We caught Daimon,” she said.

  “Daimon’s alive?”

  “Daimon was Smitt the spy.” Daimon sank Nightjar. “Now Cly’s got him.”

  Garland had been sitting in a dark corner of the arbor, carving a little flute from a stick of wood. Now he stood, making an ineffectual swipe at the wood curls and shavings, which tumbled down his pants.

  “Come on,” she said. “Unless you want to end up married tonight, we’ve got an escape to plan.”

  They hurried over to the hotel suite, where Uhura was doing an acrobatic dance on her perch. “Hailing frequency,” Sophie said. “Anyone there? Rodger dodger?”

  “That is obnoxious, Ducks.”

  “Bram!” Hearing his voice, she welled up. “Where are you guys? Are you here?”

  “Let me get Verena.” There was a minute or so of nothing; the bird hopped around, tootling. Then it said, “Verena here. We’re laying anchor outside the Hoarfrost harbor, aboard Capo, maybe a mile and a half out.”

  “So close! How did you—”

  “Magic, of course,” Verena said. “Problem is, Sylvanna’s customs office has tagged us for a goods and contraband search. They aren’t planning to let us dock anytime soon. It’s a holiday, they say.”

  “A mile and a half’s not so bad,” Sophie mused. “We might swim out to join you.”

  She glanced at Garland.

  “The tide would be out,” he said. “I doubt the swim would be very difficult, even—”

  She put a hand over his mouth before he could say something about her bruised shoulder.

  “I don’t like your chances of getting safely through the harbor of a bonded nation,” Verena said. “They’ll have mines, probably mermaids or shark oddities, too. And if we take you aboard and they search us, they’ll catch you.”

  “That could be awkward, but we’re not criminals.”

  “No swimming,” Bram said. “You saw how they booby-trapped the northeast coast. If there’s any chance they’ve done that to the harbor to prevent runaway slaves…”

  “Okay. No swimming. We’d need a rowboat, then. Or we slip onto some other ship berthed in the harbor, wait out the ceremony, and then sneak out to Capo.”

  “If we do that,” Garland objected, “we’re involving some other crew in our troubles.”

  She paced the hotel room as he updated the others on the latest developments and tried to rough out an escape plan. If they could go into the ocean somewhere other than the harbor. If they climbed down the cliffs and someone met them.

  All of which assumed they could get away from the ceremony itself, after the wedding banquet.

  “His Honor will know we’re making for Capo,” Garland said. “All he has to do is … what was the term?… stake us out.”

  She interrupted. “I have a better idea.”

  “Shoot,” said the bird—she wasn’t sure if it was Bram speaking or Verena.

  “It’s a lot to ask, Garland.”

  He made a gesture: Go ahead.

  “We go, we eat, we free Kev. Then I distract Cly—”

  “How?”

  “By being an awful, embarrassing outlander, of course. And you—”

  She got stuck. Her mouth opened, but breath wouldn’t sustain the words.

  Comprehension dawned … and to her relief, Garland broke out a dazzling smile. “I could abandon you before the ceremony!”

  “Would that be horrible for your reputation?”

  “I’ve been a disgrace to society for most of my life.” Garland grinned. “Sophie, it’s perfect.”

  “Hey, baby, wanna slink off and leave me at the altar?”

  “Oh my God, are you kissing?” The bird made a sound that was eerily like a snort. “You guys are completely weird. You know that, right?”

  Sophie felt, again, that sense of complete confidence in Garland. It radiated, like sunshine, and she wasn’t sure which of them it came from. “He would have refused to get hitched anyway.”

  “Would I?” He raised his eyebrows, pretending surprise.

  “You’re too honorable to vow a lifetime commitment if either of us was under any kind of duress.”

  “I wouldn’t, as you put it, slink off.”

  “No, you’d reject me openly. Right there in front of everyone.”

  “If left with no choice—”

  “Guys, this is verging on foreplay,” Bram said. “We’re getting off the phone.”

  “No, wait! We need stuff.”

  “Like what? Runaway Groom for Dummies?”

  “I don’t know … ‘runaway groom’?” Garland said.

  “Bram, Verena, make a huge fuss about the customs search. Do everything you would do if the plan was for us to run for Capo together.”

  “Sure. But what are you going to do with Kev, once you free him?”

  “I don’t think spiriting him off Sylvanna’s an issue anymore. Willing participant or not, he’s in on whatever’s going on here. He may not have stabbed Selwig, but he by the Seas didn’t bother to tell us that Daimon did.”

  “So he’ll be arrested?”

  “Yeah, that’s my guess.” And tried. And sentenced to death again, probably. In the end, all I bought him was a few months.

  “Okay, Sofe. Go sleuth, and don’t get hurt.”

  “Let’s get all this political maneuvering over with so we can raise Nightjar and go do some proper science.”

  “Go, Team Science,” Bram agreed. It was, apparently, a farewell. Uhura shook herself back into birdlike indifference.

  “Come on, Garland. Time to go back to the Black Fox and see if we can shake any facts out of our conspirator.”

  He caught her by the arm, spinning her to face him. He waited until she had stopped—stopped moving, stopped thinking about Kev—until he had her full attention.

  “Someday, Sophie Hansa, when there’s no duress involved, I will ask.”

  She put her finger on his lips. “Garland. We understand each other.”

  “Do we?”

  “I meant what I said to Cly,” she said. “You can jilt me just as hard as you want. If they march us up to a priest or whatever and ask if I want to be with you…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a motormouth, remember? And do you think I’m gonna take up lying now?”

  He all but glowed.

  “Come on. Let’s figure out what they’ve been up to and go humiliate ourselves publicly. This time tomorrow, we can be having illicit, scandalous, celebratory breakup sex on Capo.”

  He drew her closer. “We can’t keep sailing this pace. We were out through the night.”

  “Yeah, Garland. Because things are happening.”

  He kissed her, moving again with that maddening, focused sense of leisure. “You must at least pause.”

  “That?” She kissed him back. “Is not the way to slow me down.”

  “No? What about this?”

  “Vroom.” She giggled. “Vroom, vroom! Do not pass Go!”

  “None of that makes any sense at all,” Garland said, and then he was lifting her, pivoting so her kicking feet were aimed at the door of her room, trusting that she’d boot it aside as he pointed their bodies—they were both laughing now, so hard she could feel his legs shaking—at the bed.

  CHAPTER 34

  Later—after—they did catch a few hours of sleep.

  She found herself stirring at just around noon, awakened from a dream of Verena’s voice that turned out to actually be Verena, muffled by a closed door and speaking again through the bird.

  “… always had this idea of what my life would be, you know? And it
was Gale’s life, sort of. You and me and Nightjar and all the intrigues. Now everything’s changed. Gale’s gone and the ship’s sunk—”

  Sophie felt a triple punch of guilt. One on the chin, for getting Nightjar sunk, one in the gut, for her half sister’s heartbreak. Plus a third, for eavesdropping.

  She glanced around the bedroom. No way out that wouldn’t take her past Garland. She toyed with putting a pillow over her head.

  Garland answered, sotto voce, “I always thought that, too.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s what we made provision for. Gale and I talked of it, often. How it would be, where I would take you. Verena, you must see that but for the romantic question—”

  “The tiny matter of the romantic question,” she said, but Sophie was relieved to hear a thread of humor in her sister’s voice.

  “Aside from that tiny matter, are we not together? Sailing? Amid the intrigue?”

  There was a long silence. “Yeah, we are. Of course we are. And speaking of romantic matters, I should go do you guys that favor.”

  There was a whistle, and then Garland crept back into the room, holding the bird on his arm. His bare feet were looking a little pink and peeled, but there’d been a lot of healing. He was walking normally.

  He hesitated when he saw that her eyes were open.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I heard the tail end of that.”

  “No harm done,” he said, giving her a quick kiss and then, almost before she reached for them, passing over her clothes.

  “What time is it?”

  “Well past noon.”

  A sound, outside: Cly returning.

  He made a great pretense of hanging his cloak with his back turned, allowing them to imagine he hadn’t noticed them emerging from her room together. “Daimon, it turns out, isn’t the real Daimon.”

  “Is he Smitt?” Sophie asked. “One of those last-minute additions to the Incannis crew?”

  Cly nodded. “He must have waylaid Mensalohm’s law clerk before the clerk could board Nightjar. The clarionhouse has been in touch with your fingerprint man, Humbrey. There’s a body, found asea, that may be the true Daimon Tern. Humbrey is working on proof.”